Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss

Voices please enter one at a time singing the same tune from the top.

Terry and I were at Fort Mason Saturday for the art fair and on our way back cut through the Presidio and I noticed this cannon at the Lombard gate There are two n’s in cannon and two cannons at the gate fyi

 

“Row Row Row Your boat” — a round.

 

Canons — again not to be confused with the Robert Dinero story about his first gig in a Shakespeare play and he has one line after a weapon is fired and he is supposed to say “hark, I hear…” and instead he says “what the fuck was that?” Oh, I forget to say above in the previous graph that, according to EI not AI, “fugue subject should remain self-similar and identifiable”.

J.S. Bach Goldberg Variations has nine examples of canons. So, how many pieces of the Goldberg Variations are not canons?

Pachibel’s Canon is more about the repeated chord progression than being a canon.

Since a canon is an operation, all sorts of further operations are possible to the material. verbatim.

Conlon Nancarrow, especially Canon X.

Lina Allemano “Canons” or Canons on Lumo Records.

Trumpet.

She sounds like Paul Hindemith meets Don Cherry.

(Which, if you permit the digression — from my own post — which is so far just a re-sorting of Ethan’s article — reminds me of Don Cherry on wood flute versus weird electronics in Dartmouth’s lab circa 1970 with Jon Appleton which is probably best left obscure although it was my interaction with Jon circa 2004 — 10 years after Don’s passing – -that catalyzed the reissue of Human Music).

I mean, I claim a certain expertise on Don Cherry and most specifically Don Cherry at Dartmouth based on having identified and interviewed a dozen or so people who knew Don, played with him or studied with him at Dartmouth…and it was Steve Lacy who encouraged me to bone up on Don, whittle standing in a bar in San Carlos, CA the day before Steve’s hit thereabouts, and before the karaoke people made us flee.

I guess I could lie about the time I sang karaoke with Steve Lacy and Roswell Rudd in a bar in San Carlos, CA know that they are both dead.

Bill Frisell and looping.

Electronic duo BLOOP. Mike Smith.

Peggy Lee not the singer — friend of Wayne Horvitz who I will see this fall.

Brodie West clarinet.

Ryan driver on analog synth. Ok, you got me, I’m an oxymoron.

Is analog synth the sound of don Cherry circa 1970 knocking over Dartmouth bleet machine?

Which reminds me that I made a joke about Marta Sanchez Turing stet turning the Yamaha C7 into a three-part orchestra with pieces of tape – I said that Stanford had spent millions on this concept in the 1960s or 1970s with John Chowning and she could have saved them the trouble.

(And more digression: I asked Kris Davis or asked her email to go play the Stanford math department piano that was donated by Paul J. Cohen based on her signing to her label someone else whose album title referenced a math concept. But there’s also a current undergrad who plays keyboards and is a math major or co-term — but never noticed the piano in the math department…)

Trombonist Matthias Muller.

Aldo Clementi (1925-2011)

The critic Paul Griffiths

…who denotes Clemente’s “alexandrian simplicity” — Alexander who? is this a knock-knock joke? Or knock-knock-knock-knock? Knock-knock-knock-knock-knock (5:4).

Manuele Morbidini of Umbria Jazz — who also played on Ethan’s bud Powell project. And also collaborated with Bill Frisell, hopefully beyond mere looping. Going outside the loop perhaps.

Ethan writes: it’s hard to imagine a compelling reason for something by Ligeti or Schnittke to make a leap to four saxophones.

Themes by Monk “Blues” and “Blues 2” – -and how are they related (“symmetrical inversion” suggests EI not to be confused yet with AI).

See also Von Himmel Hoch an old lutheran tune that Bach and Stravinsky made elaborately canonical

A standout track is “Momento” an atonal canon in slow decay.

 

So that’s about 20 ideas that I can barely parrot back — made worse by this word processor device that wants to bake the parrot, or so it seems. And it would probably take me six weeks of working 9 to 5 to actually feel confident about all this to discuss it with a musician who is not one of my pseudo-mentors.

I’ve been doing this for 30 years — this in the sense of producing concerts and sometimes advising musicians — as compared to doing this in the sense of being a writer which started around age 15 so that’s 45 years.

Part of me would rather do nothing but write about the world.

And I could possibly bluff my way thru another 30 years of Earthwise Productions without making any real progress on answering those 20 or so questions above.

And why is is fun to imagine that between June 2 (a blues concert, built around guitar) and October 14 I have a guitar and sax and quartet show with Karl Evangelista so maybe I could just woodshed in the sense of doing no work but just trying to study and learn fro about 18 weeks. Like, how much better would that make my experience as the promoter? And how much of that gets passed on to the audience or listener (or the performers)?

There’s a quote from Kirk Hammett that I found interesting about the difference between song and sculpture I will edit to add.

 

but I will sign out with this thing about Dinero the source is Playboy:

his guy hasn’t acted in about 15 years, because he always forgets his lines, so finally he has to give it up. He’s working in a gas station and gets a phone call from someone saying that they want him for a Shakespearean play—all he has to do is say, “Hark! I hear the cannon roar!” He says, “Well, God, I don’t know.” The director says, “Look, it’ll be OK. You’ll get paid and everything.” So he says, “OK, I’ll do it.” The play has five acts and he has to go on in the third act and say, “Hark! I hear the cannon roar!” That’s all he has to do. So he rehearses it when he’s in his apartment: “Hark! I hear the cannon roar! Hark! I hear the cannon roar! Hark! I hear the cannon roar!” Every variation, every possible emphasis. They’re into rehearsal, and he’s got it written on his mirror: “Hark! I hear the cannon roar! Hark! I hear the cannon roar! Hark! I hear the cannon roar!” And so on. Finally, comes opening night, first act, no problem. Second act, things go fine. Audience applauds. Stage manager says, “You have five minutes for the third act.” He tells him to get backstage. His time comes, he runs out, muttering to himself, “Hark! I hear the cannon roar! Hark! I hear the cannon roar! Hark! I hear the cannon roar!” And as he runs out, he hears a big brrrooooom!! Turns around and says, “What the fuck was that?”

and1: when my cousin the classical composer and performer Isaac Blumfield was in St. Paul for his bar mitzvah his punk band the Souldiers performed at a bowling alley – actually the photo of me and a bowling not canon or cannon ball is the masthead for Plastic Alto. His band name was “soul” plus “soldier”. But I suggested to him perhaps gratuitously that he could change the name to Mouldiers suggesting “mould” as in Bob Mould plus “soldiers” — Bob Mould was from the punk band Husker Du and went to nearby Macalester College. Also: the fictional name Fuguees could exist combining songs by The Fugees — Roberta Flack “Killing Me Softly” for instance — arranged as fugues and sung by classical choirs, maybe? in the way confederacy of beards does Leonard Cohen.

And please remember that Ethan Iverson was the one in The Bad Plus who had never heard of all the rock songs they arranged for jazz piano, jazz bass and drums. And The New Bad Plus or what I call The Bad Plus Minus Ethan Iverson plus Orrin Evans Perhaps plays Stanford this month. The Bad Plus plays Stanford Jazz Workshop series on July 13 — during my sabbatical or woodshed — wow I wrote “woodshop” and AI knew to change it back to “woodshed” — but there is NO PIANO — its the original rhythm section of Reid on bass and Dave on drums plus Ben Monder guitar and Chris Speed on tenor. Ok. The tagline says “MILES DAVIS MEETS RADIOHEAD — LIVE AND UNPREDICTABLE” They helpfully mention Ethan Iverson (EI) and Orrin Evans (OE) in the bio or beioe. A “beioe” is a bio, say, for The Bad Plus, that mentions significant former member, sfm.

This probably doesn’t go here at all but a source told me that Cisco the computer company approximately gets 120 million visitors and two billion views each year. Do the math even in your head and this is like one third of a million visitors each day, or 300,000 visitors each day. Which is what Plastic Alto gets or got all time. [I get about 10,00 visitors per year, since w 2011 or about 100,000 all time — Cisco website will beat that again by lunch tummorrow.

edit to add, a day later: it occurs to me, singingly, that it might take me just as long to understand this:

PARELES There are some magnificent moments among the synths, especially with the vocal harmonies in songs like “So Long, London” and “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can).” But some of the sameness also comes from tunes and cadences that are starting to feel too familiar. One that especially stuck out to me on this album is the way a sustained verse melody gives way to a choppy pre-chorus, or chorus, that arrives in two-syllable bursts, the way it does in “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” “Fresh Out the Slammer,” “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” “The Prophecy” and “The Bolter.”

When Swift started using that device, it brought some fresh hip-hop percussiveness into songwriting that was rooted in country. But now it’s standard practice for Swift and her many emulators. Swift is 11 albums and umpteen bonus tracks into her recording career, so it’s harder for her to evade echoes of her past. The songs near the end of this album, especially, start to sound like outtakes from “Folklore,” pretty as they are. But no one is forcing her to put 31 songs on an album, either.